Hello and welcome to Beautiful Losers! 

We begin today’s discussion with President Trump’s recent critique of critical race theory. Who is the audience for the President’s attack? When he talks about how the left wants to erase history and indoctrinate children, who is he addressing? 

It’s a criticism that feels pointed toward those that have studied critical race theory. In fact, we’ve discussed the work of Adolph Reed Jr. on this show, a noted critical race theorist. Are we the object of the president’s attack? Are our listeners the subject of indoctrination? The idea is laughable. The reality is that only a small fraction of humanities students and professionals can claim critical-race theory expertise. If you sample a random population of Americans, our guess is would be that 0 could offer an accurate definition of critical race theory. 

On the world of the internet, especially twitter, the story is much different—within a media literate and college-educated population you’ll find a greater concentration of people familiar with the discourse, though even here we’re speaking in terms of small demographic fractions. Our point is simply that this rhetorical attack is largely pointed toward a class of media-savvy professionals who have already decided how they would like to vote. No one of that class cares about Trump’s presentation of critical race theory. In the end it become more fodder for emotion-fueled outcries. New rhetorical ammunition to add into the emotion-filled and idea- poor discourse.

That said, we believe this rhetoric is extremely powerful. Red-scare style tactics from democrats and republicans have been a cornerstone of political discourse for over a century. The bottom line is that fear is a powerful rhetorical tool and it would be naive to think that we must simply educate ourselves out of the problem. Scholarly debates about race and theory are always going to be a losing proposition, from the view of electoral politics. This is a lesson that should have been learned during the culture wars in the 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s. Political debates about the culture serve one purpose: distracting a population from legislation.

This is a good example of one of the traps of a humanities-focused education. As good theorists we want to engage with this debate because we know it’s one we can win on grounds of logic and reason. But the deeper lesson is this: to even have the debate makes you a loser. A better approach is a systems theory approach: don’t use electoralism as the ground to have your theoretical debates; don’t use the academy as a means to practice your electoral politics. Align your purpose with the most efficacious outcomes.

That said, we think these attacks must be taken seriously. Perhaps the best response is to try and jiu-jitsu the argument. The President hails his 1776 Commission, we should welcome it. The years 1776 through 1803 saw some of the most progressive action of any nation during the enlightenment. The founders oversaw a careful and considerate dismantling of aristocratic structures in order to create a more democratic system. History is a slippery thing, often much more radical and challenging than a stump speech.

Our main topic this week is the Terrance Malick film A Hidden Life. You can stream the film on HBO, it was never released widely in theaters because of covid, a real shame because the photography is incredible. If it ever comes to theaters, be sure to see it. 

Martin Heidegger is one of the many ghosts of this show. He haunts us, he haunts the thinkers that we like to read and engage with, and he haunts our work. Malick’s work takes up the work of Heidegger’s philosophy through film. This is in part because Heidegger himself theorized later in his career that the work of traditional philosophy was over and done with. The intellectual project to understand being must fall to the poets. Malick, as a graduate student studying Heidegger, took this call seriously and became a filmmaker.

We think it’s wrong to say that the work of philosophy moves into the work the artists. This formulation gives priority to philosophy, as if the film’s value is primarily as a philosophical text. It’s a fundamentally reductive argument and it fails to fully understand the language and knowledge that the arts possess. Furthermore, if we take Heidegger’s argument seriously, then the reason that intellectual work must be done through the arts is because the arts capture a kind of knowledge that is completely barred from the philosophical. Or put another way, there was a reason that Heidegger himself believed that philosophical work had to move into the arts. Philosophy is no longer sufficient; in fact, philosophy (according to Heidegger) has maintained the lie of being/metaphysics for thousands of years. To say that the arts are “philosophical” is to undermine and ignore the specific language and knowledge that the arts possess. 

We find that the film reveals itself most strongly in small moments. The way the camera holds on hands working in the dirt, the contrast between the alienation of modern life and the communal experience of the farm village.

Most subtle and most striking are the different kinds of time that the film employs. Just a sample of these time scales include the geological time of the mountain valley, which has emerged after millions of years of geological development; the ritual experiences of religion speak to a cyclical experience of the eternal; the seasonal agricultural work reminds us of a connection between the land and the individual; and finally the empty time of modernity where every day is the same until your execution, which speaks to the ways that time can become emptied out of meaning through social forces. 

The film presents its protagonist, the historical figure Franz Jägerstätter as a kind of Bartelby-figure. Bartelby, the Herman Melville protagonist, decides on day to simply say “I would prefer not to” whenever he is asked anything. Franz takes a similar course of action when he is asked to swear fealty to Adolph Hitler as a condition of his conscription. Both his faith and his sense of humanity prevent him from swearing loyalty to any man or woman. As a result he is imprisoned and eventually executed. 

Our discussion identified two central arguments and themes. First: the true antagonists of the film are not the Nazis, they are the villages who submit to the dominant cultural ideology and who betray the communal bonds when Franz decides to resist. The villagers’ actions reveal a disparity and false-identifaction that people make with ideological and political forces. The forces of world history work their way through a society and an individual agent can do nothing in the face of those forces. Where an individual can make a difference is in how she choses to comport herself with her neighbors. This presentation is made all the more stark in the face of increasing political bifurcation and political identification in the United States. This presentation isn’t about some other political order that trumps the partisan (like in an Obama-styled speech about how we’re all Americans), instead this is a more fundamental argument about what it means to “be-with” each other in a communal way.

The second (and related) argument concerns the basis for a politics that the film offers and withholds. What strikes us about the politics of the film is that it shows a political position and resistance that is only possible when one can truly dwell in the Heideggerian sense. At the end of the day, the people of Ragdeburg don’t need the Nazi party or any political organization in order to maintain their life. They know how to farm the land and build the necessary technology to live as a community. This represents a stark difference between the society portrayed in the film and the society we inhabit today. In comparing ourselves and lives with the world of the film, we are much more dependent on the political economy in order to secure basic needs.

We leave you with this fundamental tension: our society is more alienated, but our fate is more intimately connected with each other. This dynamic is felt on all levels of society, from the individual to the political and economic. Any organization therefore must emerge with this fundamental relationship in mind. 

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